2023 Goals Revisited

So far this year has gone a little differently than I had planned, and I'm already having to restructure my goals for 2023.  Initially I had planned to finish the first installment of Ruby Ransome in January so that I could work on revisions in March, after letting it sit for a little bit.

Unfortunately, I hadn't been considering other projects that would need my attention, and in actuality I have spent January and February so far on a massive house reorganization project.  In retrospect, it was something that had to happen first, since my house was pretty cluttered and dirty from way too many months in 2022 of not having time to clean.  But it has definitely pushed back my plans for my novel, and will likely have an impact on that schedule once I get back to work on it.

Currently, my plan is to finish the house reorganization project by the end of February.  I am hoping to start working on my novel nightly again once I get the bigger portions of the project done, hopefully in the next week or two, but definitely by the end of the month!

Goals for 2023

I'm not usually big on making New Year's resolutions, but after years of not making any at all, I'm finding that I do actually have some goals for this year, and some of them are to do with Ruby.

As I've mentioned before, my goal for 2023 is to get Ruby Ransome and Pandora's Box published.  I'm planning on self-publishing, so I know I have some work ahead of me.  My goal is to get the draft I'm currently working on done in January.  I'm a fan of letting the draft sit for a little bit before doing revisions, so I'm planning on working on something else in February - probably the cover.  If all goes well, in March I'll do revisions, and hopefully that'll be the last round of revisions before passing the book to beta readers.  After that, I'll do a final round of revisions based on feedback, and possibly have a round of professional editing done before self-publishing the book.

During all this, once I have a cover ready, I plan to start doing some marketing.  I also want to do some research and figure out a game plan for publishing and marketing, including what platforms I want to publish on.

At the same time, I'll need to start working on the next installments of the series.  It's my goal to get several standalone short stories published over the summer, followed by the second book in the fall, and a Christmas novella in time for the holidays.  This is a pretty ambitious schedule (although thankfully the short stories are already written and just need some revisions and polishing) so I'll need to keep up with the daily writing.  And editing, and marketing, and publishing...

It's promising to be a busy year, but I'm also so excited for all of it!

Happy Holidays!

The past week has been challenging, and I haven't posted much as a result.  We've had a lot of demands on our time, plus the weather in the last few days added a lot to the schedule.  We had an arctic blast here in Colorado, as did much of the rest of the country, and far more time than usual was consumed with taking care of the horses.  Water tanks freeze over very quickly in that extreme cold, and since I do chores at the barn, we had a lot of ice to break out every day on top of the regular care of the horses.

As a result, it has been several days since I worked on Ruby.  I've been either too busy or too exhausted pretty much every night.  Currently, I have four days in a row with no work on the novel.  If I were to work on it before midnight this evening, I could make that three, but I'm not sure I'll have a chance before midnight.

I've decided that given everything that's been going on the last few days, though, it's okay that I haven't had a chance to write.  After all, it's the holidays.  And as long as I can pick it back up afterward, I think it's okay to take a break.

Happy holidays!

Figuring Out Series Management

The last few days I've been focusing on something else rather than writing: series management.

It started because I wanted to decide whether to get Aeon Timeline 3 before my coupon code expired.  I downloaded the trial and was playing with it, and then realized I had purchased Aeon Timeline 2 about five years ago and never used it, so I downloaded and played with that too.  The newer version definitely has the better user interface and features, but I was having a hard time with the program's feature that syncs with Scrivener (I couldn't delete a document in Scrivener because Aeon kept putting it back), and anyway syncing wasn't going to work if I wanted to use the same timeline for the entire series.

So after some poking around, I ended up downloading Plottr as well.  I had been hearing conflicting information about whether you could write in it, but it definitely is not a word processing program.  It will, however, make an excellent kind of "home base" for my series notes, character sheets, location sheets, and for tracking all the installments of the series.  The user interface is absolutely gorgeous, I love the at-a-glance display of all the books in a series, and the layout is common sense and lacks all the complexity of Scrivener (which, as much as I love Scrivener, it is complex and not ideal for managing an entire series).

In the end, I decided to use all three programs.  Plottr will be my series bible and my main method of managing the series, and I'll export each installment to Scrivener individually.  Aeon Timeline will provide precise dating and a way to keep track of historical events versus series events, and of course I need Scrivener to write in.  And while I'm at it, why not upgrade to Scrivener 3, too?

It may sound complex, but after three days spent researching options and experimenting with Plottr, Aeon, and Scrivener 3, I think this combination is going to do the best possible job of helping me manage a rather ambitious, historically-based series.  Right now I'm working on transferring all of my notes into Plottr.  From there I'll export individual novels and stories into Scrivener, and all of my notes will automagically duplicate into related installments (I can set what books or stories they are used in).

Getting organized is making me really excited about this series.  I feel like the rewriting is going really well, and now I have a plan going forward.  In addition to the first novel, which I'm currently rewriting and revising to fix some significant plot issues, I also have a handful of short stories (some written, some planned), a couple of novellas (one written, one half-written, and one planned), and three additional books half-written and planned.  That should take me through 1925, but eventually I intend for the series to continue throughout the 1920s.  It will end up being a big series so it's best to start planning how to manage it all now!

Finding Time to Write

I've been super busy lately and haven't been updating my sidebar progress bar, but I actually have been writing every day.  Sometimes it's not much, but as long as I do a little, I figure that counts!  There was one day that my mom stayed over, so I didn't write that night after midnight as I usually do, so I made up for it with some extra writing earlier in the day.

Overall I'm pleased with my progress.  I'm getting on average around 800 words a day, which isn't a lot (certainly not as much as during NaNoWriMo), but it'll get me to where I want to go.  My project on NaNoWriMo says I need a little under 800 words a day to reach 90,000 words by the end of January.  It wouldn't be a bad idea to finish the draft a little sooner, so I might try to increase my pace, but for now I'm fine with it.

More importantly, I feel like I'm digging my way through some tough scenes and figuring out some things that I actually didn't know how I was going to handle going into them.  I'm not certain I'm going to keep some of these scenes exactly how I've written them (or at all, in one case), but sometimes trying it different ways is part of the whole process of drafting and rewriting a novel.

In the meantime, I've been juggling any amount of things, from a clogged kitchen sink to a death in the family.  It's been a rough couple of weeks.

Despite all that, I now have 48,902 words, and I'm getting into the next section of the book, which is where things are going to start really ramping up.  (And yes, I know that the word count is possibly a bit off for that, which is why some scenes like the one I just wrote may end up being truncated or cut... or maybe this is just going to be a longer book than I was planning.)

Eventually I want to try to move my scheduled writing time earlier.  Lately I've been doing it all well after midnight, which is the only way to fit it in sometimes, but it also means that if I work on it longer than intended, I either get less sleep or sleep in later than intended the next day.  Ideally I'd like to spend the time from about 10pm to midnight every night on my novel, but for now that block of time has been needed for other things.

Regardless, I am making progress and figuring things out, and I couldn't be more pleased with this!

1920s Book Review: Absynthe

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Before NaNoWriMo started, when I decided I was going to rewrite Ruby Ransome and Pandora's Box, I went on a 1920s book spree.  I was initially looking for nonfiction books about the 1920s on Overdrive, but I ended up finding a ton of fiction about the 1920s, which I've been steadily plowing through (when I'm not too tired from staying up late writing my own book).

One such book was Absynthe by Brendan Bellecourt.  I checked it out along with a ton of others, after having read enough of the description to see that it mentioned casting illusions and other powers.

Once I started the book, though, I realized it wasn't urban fantasy as I'd thought it was.  It was basically dieselpunk with an alternate timeline.

It may not be vampires, and the author's vision of the 1920s might be rather different than what I was expecting, but I loved Absynthe.  It was an incredibly original take on dieselpunk, automatons, illusionists, and extrasensory abilities.  The further you get into the novel, the more you realize how different the timeline is, and the stranger and more intriguing everything gets.

The author mentions in the note at the end a couple of things I found interesting.  He thanked someone who had suggested opening it at the scene he did, which I'm guessing is what triggered the use of flashbacks in the book instead of a linear telling.  This made me think about how much more powerful of a story it was with that mystery and intrigue of what exactly had happened to the main character during the war.

The other thing he mentioned was combining characters for a more cohesive plot.  He thanked a lot of people for fixing plot holes and helping him tighten the story, and I found this interesting simply because it's such a great plot.  The story is quite complex and layered, full of interesting twists and turns.

All in all, a great book, and one I highly recommend for anyone who loves interesting takes on the Roaring Twenties!

It was nice to read something that was somewhat 20s but also not at all what I expected!  

Maintaining Accountability

While I'd like to eventually start posting some other types of things on this blog, such as fun things about the 1920s (my favorite era), for right now I've decided to keep posting about my writing progress post NaNoWriMo.  I am using this as accountability to ensure that I keep making progress on my draft, and eventually, my goal to publish.

Last night I got some writing done before midnight, actually, but the bulk of it was after midnight, and I deliberately didn't update my word count until after midnight to ensure my word count for the night would be accurate.  (With me doing a lot of my writing after midnight, I'm afraid it is going to cause an issue someday when I don't write after midnight...  I don't want to make it look like I haven't written the following day if I wait until after midnight the next night.  Night owl problems, am I right?)

I've gotten back into some scenes where I'm blending first draft stuff I liked with this draft.  But this is also the point at which the plot turns, based on the decision I made about why the character motivation and the plot weren't working.  Plus I need to flesh out the middle of the book a little more than what I originally had written.

In other words, there will be lots of rewriting from here on out.  I'm looking forward to it!